1. ʻArve naḥal, ḥashivuto shel kol Yehudi --2. Isur hitḥabrut ʻim reshaʻim--3. Ketsad la-ʻazor le-vaʻale teshuvah.

Aaron W. Hughes presents the first major study of dialogue as a Jewish philosophical practice. Examining connections between Jewish philosophy, the literary form in which it is expressed, and the culture in which it is produced, Hughes shows how Jews understood and struggled with their social, religious, and intellectual environments. In this innovative and insightful book, Hughes addresses various themes associated with the literary form of dialogue as well as its philosophical reception: Why did various thinkers choose dialogue? (...) What did it allow them to accomplish? How do the literary features of dialogue construct philosophical argument? As a history of philosophical form, context, and practice, this book will interest scholars and students working at the intersections of religious studies, philosophy, and literature. (shrink)

In this paper I raise awareness of a crucial blind spot in scholarship on the Christian-Jewish dialogue. The main argument of the paper is that a closer examination of the dialogue form is necessary in order to assess the tenability of Christian-Jewish dialogue. Despite the widespread talk and intensive scholarship about the Jewish-Christian dialogue two things remain unclear: what concept of dialogue is presupposed; what makes the dialogue form appropriate for the Christian-Jewish encounter. This paper discusses (...) the possibility that the use of the dialogue form is a means of theological imperialism. I both rule out this possibility and propose an argument to justify the tenability of Jewish-Christian dialogue that I defend against objections which follow from Richard Swinburne’s Christian philosophy of revelation. (shrink)

Hughes’ second major work can be read as an amplification of his first work, The Texture of the Divine, in which attention was paid to “secondary” themes in Jewish philosophy pertaining to aesthetics, poetics, and rhetoric; these themes have often been marginalized in histories of Jewish philosophy. In both works, Hughes focuses upon the importance of cultural history in understanding philosophical texts, exploring motifs and tropes often left out of more mainstream histories of Jewish philosophy. In The (...) Art of Dialogue, he argues that, inasmuch as a text’s content cannot be separated from its form, we must become more sensitive to why particular thinkers chose the form of dialogue over others: what did this genre allow the thinker to accomplish, and how are the literary features of the dialogue instrumental in the construction of philosophical arguments? Hughes notes that Jewish thinkers were more apt to employ the dialogue during periods in which it was popular in non-Jewish writings. Although the dialogue form itself has had a venerable history in Jewish thought, Hughes argues that there is no evidence that Jewish philosophers looked to this body of rabbinic literature when composing their own dialogues.To make his case that Jewish writers were influenced by their non-Jewish peers, Hughes examines a number of works, drawn from various periods in Jewish. (shrink)

Review of Melissa Raphael, Judaism and the Visual Image. A Jewish Theology of Art, London and New York: Continuum, 2009, 229 pp.

The case for dialogue -- Increasing moral capital through moral imagination -- The art of ethical dialogue -- Intelligent spirituality in business -- Spirituality in (and out) of the classroom -- Listening to the anxious atheists -- Beyond the flat world metaphor -- Dialogue as a restraint on wealth -- The limits of dialogue.

Two German philosophers working during the Weimar Republic in Germany, between the two World Wars, produced seminal texts that continue to resonate almost a hundred years later. Franz Rosenzweig—a Jewish philosopher, and Martin Heidegger—a philosopher who at one time was studying to become a Catholic priest, each in their own, particular way include in their writings powerful philosophies of art that, if approached phenomenologically and ethically, provide keys to understanding their radically divergent trajectories, both biographically and for their philosophical (...) heritage. Simon provides a close reading of some of their essential texts—The Star of Redemption for Rosenzweig and Being and Time and The Origin of the Work of Art for Heidegger—in order to draw attention to how their philosophies of art can be understood to provide significant ethical directives. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 26, Issue 1, pp 118 - 147 This paper challenges the widespread emphasis on the absence of God in post- Holocaust historiography, theology, and art by suggesting that Barnett Newman’s _Stations of the Cross_ may have been conceived under the theological category of the apophatic rather than the aesthetic category of the sublime. This paper focuses on the “anti-realist” position of Newman and other artists for whom the Holocaust necessitated a renewed aniconic tendency in Jewish aesthetics. (...) His work, I suggest, holds out a tension between absolute absence and redemptive presence that at once resists and affirms a negative aesthetic of God’s solidarity with suffering. (shrink)

Excerpt from The Semitic Religions: Hebrew, Jewish, Christian, Moslem John croall, Esq., of Southfield, being deeply interested in the defence and maintenance of the doctrines of the Christian Religion, and desirous of increasing the religious literature of Scotland, instituted a Lectureship. The Lectures shall be delivered biennially in Edinburgh, Shall be not less than six in number, and shall be devoted to a consideration of the Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion and the Doctrines of the Christian Religion. About (...) the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

The captivating painting of Helene Schjerfbeck, _Fête juive / Lehtimajanjuhla_ (1883), is considered to this day an exceptional piece of art with significant cultural value. It already carries great value, aside from its artistic quality and how it showcases the Jewish feast of Sukkot. What is not evident from simply looking at the artwork, however, is the intriguing background story to the fate of its models – more specifically, that of its female model, Chava Slavatitsky, and the ‘scandal’ connected (...) with her story. Her name became known all over Finland, as it gained significant attention from the local press, perhaps mainly as it occurred during the turbulent times of the late nineteenth century when the question of Jewish emancipation in Finland was frequently discussed in society. This article aims to briefly introduce the reader to Schjerfbeck’s motivation in creating the painting and to its representation of the Sukkot 140 years ago, as well as aiming to tell the extraordinary story of its relatively unknown young sitter, including her abduction and conversion to Christianity. Hence, this contribution aims to provide an addendum to the Jewish history of the country in the late 1800s and to briefly reflect on the nature of Jewish–Christian relations of the era. (shrink)

Contemporary theology, and Jewish theology in particular, Michael Fishbane asserts, now lies fallow, beset by strong critiques from within and without. For Jewish reality, a coherent and wide-ranging response in thoroughly modern terms is needed. _Sacred __Attunement_ is Fishbane’s attempt to renew Jewish theology for our time, in the larger context of modern and postmodern challenges to theology and theological thought in the broadest sense. The first part of the book regrounds theology in this setting and opens (...) up new pathways through nature, art, and the theological dimension as a whole. In the second section, Fishbane introduces his hermeneutical theology—one grounded in the interpretation of scripture as a distinctly Jewish practice. The third section focuses on modes of self-cultivation for awakening and sustaining a covenant theology. The final section takes up questions of scripture, authority, belief, despair, and obligation as theological topics in their own right. The first full-scale Jewish theology in America since Abraham J. Heschel’s _God in Search of Man _and the first comprehensive Jewish philosophical theology since Franz Rosenzweig’s _Star of Redemption_, _Sacred Attunement_ is a work of uncommon personal integrity and originality from one of the most distinguished scholars of Judaica in our time. (shrink)

“The Messiah [...] is the source of all religious art.” This statement, which we find in Cohen’s Über den ästhetischen Wert unserer religiösen Bildung, seems to be not fully consistent with the whole of Cohen’s aesthetics and with Cohen’s thought about the possibility of art having religious themes. In order to explain this statement and Cohen’s perspective about Messianism in art, in §§ 1-3 I examine Cohen’s reflections about this topic in his main works about art and religion; in § (...) 4 I maintain that the goal of this statement is to underline a difference between Jewish and Christian religious art. Finally, in § 5, I offer a short examination of some 20th or 21th century artworks that can be compared to Cohen’s views about Messianism in art: namely, Marc Chagall’s crucifixions, Gustav Mahler’s 4th symphony, and Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Terzo Paradiso. (shrink)

Menachem M. Kellner is an American-born scholar of Jewish philosophy, an educator, and a public intellectual who lives in Israel. For over three decades he taught at the University of Haifa, where he held the Sir Isaac and Lady Edith Wolfson Chair of Jewish Religious Thought as well as several high-level administrative positions. Currently he teaches Jewish philosophy at Shalem College, Israel's first liberal arts college, which seeks to integrate Western and Jewish texts. Trained in ethics (...) and political philosophy, Kellner specializes in medieval Jewish philosophy, arguing that Maimonides' rationalist universalism should serve as the ideal for contemporary Jewish life. Creatively fusing Zionism, modern Orthodoxy, and democracy, his vision of Judaism is open to and engaged with the modern world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cocceius and the Jewish CommentatorsAdina M. YoffieThe case of Johannes Cocceius defies the commonplace that Leiden University (and perhaps post-Reformation, confessionalized Europe in general) turned away from humanist scholarship in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. In 1650 Cocceius (1603-69), a Bremen-born Oriental philology professor at Franeker, joined the Leiden theological faculty and wrote a treatise, Protheoria de ratione interpretandi sive introductio in philologiam sacram (De ratione). (...) He praised such rabbinic exegetes as Rashi (1040-1105) and David Kimchi (ca. 1160-ca. 1235) in humanist terms for their erudition. At the same time the "new" Cartesian philosophy was taking hold in the arts faculty, and mathematics instruction was encroaching on scholastic formal logic.1 Leiden would become famous for Cartesianism, mathematics, and "Calvinist Copernicanism" in the second half of the seventeenth century, but Cocceius still worked in the tradition of advanced humanist scholarship that had made the institution famous in the sixteenth century.2Leiden's earlier reputation was due in large part to the biblical humanist work of such Renaissance polymaths as Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609) and Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), but by Cocceius's time Leiden theologians were subject to greater Church and State control. As Jonathan Israel and Edwin Rabbie have shown, in response to the controversy that surrounded Jacobus Arminius and his stand on predestination, the Synod of Dordrecht (Dort) drafted an anti-Arminian statement in 1619; any professor who did not sign was subject [End Page 383] to exile from the republic in addition to dismissal from his post.3 Innovative theology, exegesis, and philology suffered as professors, fearing State and Church reprisals, turned to "dogmatic humanism." As Henk Jan de Jonge has explained, this meant that "almost all the theologians of seventeenth-century Leiden who concerned themselves with the explanation of the New Testament placed exegesis at the service of dogmatic objectives."4 Unlike his fellow Leiden theologians, Cocceius pursued biblical humanism and Christian Hebraism through the study of Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic-and he did so in a unique way. He was not the first to use Jewish commentaries and even Jewish post-biblical literature for the purpose of reconstructing the original Hebrew Bible, but he was innovative in praising rabbinic scholars as fellow humanists and in incorporating their scholarship into his Christological exegesis and philosophy. He did so, furthermore, not as an independent scholar or pastor or even as a professor of Hebrew; but as the holder of a university chair in theology at a confessionalized university in a century hostile to his brand of late humanism.Although he came to Leiden as a theologian, Cocceius had impressive training as an Orientalist. He had studied with the famous scholar Sixtinus Amama (1593-1629) and polished his Hebrew and Aramaic by working with a Jewish tutor from Hamburg.5 While still a student at Franeker, Cocceius wrote a translation and commentary of the Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin. A few years later he began composing commentaries on the Pentateuch, and, by the time he arrived at Leiden, he had completed one lecture, series of lectures, or piece of writing on every book of the Old Testament. These commentaries were based not only on Cocceius's extensive knowledge of Oriental languages but also on his readings of medieval Jewish commentators. These were the same commentators that Cocceius would later praise in chapter eight of the De ratione.These humanist achievements were much at variance with Cocceius's public persona as perhaps the most prominent Dutch Calvinist theologian of the seventeenth century. For approximately 100 years after his death in 1669 a faction of Leiden theologians calling themselves "Cocceians" battled the "Voetians," followers of Gisbertus Voetius, for the soul of the Dutch Church.6 At Leiden he lectured on the Pauline Epistles, a typical subject for a seventeenth-century Calvinist theologian, and he worked on his famous theological tract, the salvation-historical Summa doctrinae de foedere et testamento Dei (1648). Neither the De ratione nor his voluminous biblical commentary (except [End Page 384] for a short treatise on the last six chapters of Deuteronomy) was published in Cocceius's lifetime. His son Johann Heinrich released these and his father's... (shrink)

This article offers an insight into Yoḥanan Alemanno’s study of the ‘art of thinking’ through his notes from Averroes’s commentaries on Posterior Analytics, De anima and Parva naturalia. This case study represents an important example of the 15th-century Jewish learning based on the Arabic-Hebrew philosophical tradition and shows the continuity between the Provençal world and the Italian Renaissance. The textual appendix included at the end of the article aims at showing how Alemanno selected portions of Averroes’s commentaries on logic (...) and psychology that define the role of the faculty of imagination and the processes through which we acquire true knowledge. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 26, Issue 1, pp 118 - 147 This paper challenges the widespread emphasis on the absence of God in post- Holocaust historiography, theology, and art by suggesting that Barnett Newman’s _Stations of the Cross_ may have been conceived under the theological category of the apophatic rather than the aesthetic category of the sublime. This paper focuses on the “anti-realist” position of Newman and other artists for whom the Holocaust necessitated a renewed aniconic tendency in Jewish aesthetics. (...) His work, I suggest, holds out a tension between absolute absence and redemptive presence that at once resists and affirms a negative aesthetic of God’s solidarity with suffering. (shrink)

La importancia que tiene el relato de la creación del mundo (Gen 1-2) para judíos, cristianos y musulmanes, se refleja en diferentes manifestaciones artísticas medievales. Este artículo analiza algunas de las representaciones a que dio lugar dicho relato, y al uso diverso del lenguaje artístico –figurativo y no figurativo– a que recurrieron los artistas. La segunda parte del artículo se centra en el examen de la Sinagoga del Tránsito de Toledo y propone, a través del estudio conjunto de decoración y (...) epigrafía, y de algunos referentes culturales judíos, una interpretación que descubre en sus muros una representación no figurativa y simbólica del capítulo primero del Génesis. (shrink)

Jewish German philosopher Ernst Cassirer was a leading proponent of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. The essays in this volume provide a window into Cassirer’s discovery of the symbolic nature of human existence—that our entire emotional and intellectual life is configured and formed through the originary expressive power of word and image, that it is in and through the symbolic cultural systems of language, art, myth, religion, science, and technology that human life realizes itself and attains not only its (...) form, its visibility, but also its reality. Thought and being are set in opposition and united in genuine correspondence by the symbolic strife between them that Cassirer calls _Auseinandersetzung,_ which determines the ethical relationship of the self to the other. (shrink)

This book proposes a theory of reference--answering the question of whether Jewish, Christian, and Muslim scriptures refer to the same God--within a semantic framework acceptable to atheists and fideists.

Jewish German philosopher Ernst Cassirer was a leading proponent of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. The essays in this volume provide a window into Cassirer’s discovery of the symbolic nature of human existence—that our entire emotional and intellectual life is configured and formed through the originary expressive power of word and image, that it is in and through the symbolic cultural systems of language, art, myth, religion, science, and technology that human life realizes itself and attains not only its (...) form, its visibility, but also its reality. Thought and being are set in opposition and united in genuine correspondence by the symbolic strife between them that Cassirer calls _Auseinandersetzung,_ which determines the ethical relationship of the self to the other. (shrink)

The interrupted absolute : art, religion and the "new categorical imperative" -- "The ever-broken promise of happiness" : interrupting art, or Adorno -- "Absolute insomnia" : interrupting religion, or Levinas -- "To preserve the question" : interrupting the book, or Jabès -- Conclusion : sharing the imperative.

This book discusses Ramon Llull (ca. 1232-1316), the Christian missionary, philosopher and mystic, his relations with Jewish contemporaries, and how he ...

It was [Maria] Edgeworth’s deeply personal motive in writing Harrington that made possible the special self-reflexive quality that informs her novel. In the act of reviewing her role as a reader and a writer of anti-Semitic portraits, she was able to recognize a tradition of discourse she had at once inherited and perpetuated. And only by recognizing such a tradition was she able both to subvert it in Harrington and to articulate for future writers the way to move beyond it. (...) In short, she boldly turned her personal self-examination into a cultural critique: she diagnosed a disorder in “the imaginations of the good people of England,”4 and in so doing she issued a challenge and founded a new tradition. In Harrington Edgeworth inquires into the trials that the English imagination must undergo if it is to exorcise the powerful figure of Shylock, and thereby issues a challenge taken up in subsequent novels : the tradition I am designating “the novel of Jewish Identity” attempts to articulate, investigate, and subvert The Merchant of Venice’s function as the English master text for representing “the Jew.” Maria Edgeworth, Harrington, vol. 9 of Tales and Novels , p. 148; hereafter cited by page number. Michael Ragussis, professor of English at Georgetown University, is the author of The Subterfuge of Art: Language and the Romantic Tradition and Acts of Naming: The Family Plot in Fiction . He is currently working on a book-length study entitled “Figures of Conversion: Jewish Identity and British Fiction.”. (shrink)

Ramon Llull was acutely aware of Islamic and Jewish divergences from Christian belief. He undertook a quest for "necessary reasons" to show that, where these belief systems diverged, Christian belief is true. Though largely self-taught, Llull managed three stays at the University of Paris. Encounters between the incandescent Mallorcan and academic orthodoxy contributed hugely to Llull's changing conception of necessary reasons. These changes are abundantly documented in Anthony Bonner's The Art and Logic of Ramon Llull.Llull's understanding of necessary reasons (...) is different in the Ars magna's quaternary phase, its ternary phase, and a post-Art logical phase. In the quaternary phase, necessary reasons are often presented as demonstrative; fully ten works use the term in their title. Although Llull meant 'demonstration' in a sense broader than Aristotle's, Parisian academics objected, mistakenly thinking he was trying to prove dogmas like the Trinity and Incarnation through Aristotelian demonstrations propter quid and quia. As Bonner conjectures, this may be why no work from the ternary phase mentions. (shrink)

Disability dance lays claim to the provocative possibilities of the disabled body, raising profound questions about the politics of art, affect, and embodiment. For scholars of religion, disability dance is a powerful—and as yet unrecognized—site for probing the sacrality and ethics enacted in disability culture. This article brings the biblical tale of Jacob and the angel into conversation with a contemporary performance, “The Way You Look (at me) Tonight,” an intimate duet between choreographer and performer Jess Curtis and Clare Cunningham, (...) an internationally acclaimed dancer who explores the artistry of lived disability experience. Using dance as a hermeneutic invitation to draw out ethical insights into risk, consent, and intimacy, I offer a disability-sensitive reading of Genesis 32—reading the angel as a body whose presence attests to the brilliant shock of disability difference and probing the psychic and somatic transformation that unfolds when Jacob comes into kinesthetic contact with disability and the sacred. (shrink)